Telepathy 5

He ran up the stairs this time, around the curve of the ring, all the way to its apex, above even the monitoring station, pressing through the crowd. Their thoughts, loud and sullen, mingled with his own. He climbed a ladder to an access hatch—one that civilians on the ring weren’t even supposed to know about—and stepped out onto the roof of the massive structure he called home.

He stood hundreds of feet above the valley floor on the angled, rusty plates that made up the ring’s outer shell. The wind whipped at his cloak, and he pulled his scarf up around his head. Here, far from the inhabited portions of the ring, he could think without interruption. Other peoples’ thoughts were distant echoes; he couldn’t hear anything but the whistling of the wind.

JACE’S ORIGIN: ABSENT MINDS